In Through the Out Door

On Friday, we got a solid B at navigating Massachusetts State Highway 60 en route to Arlington, MA.

More importantly, the lovely Alicia was linked to on noted craft blog One Pretty Thing. If you're a craft blogger, take the survey!

Whichever weekend is closest to July 4th has long been the unofficial start to "summer" - tourist season, really - on the Seacoast. Still, I was shocked to see cars backed up from Portsmouth more or less down to the Mass. state line. The next barrier northbound is the Maine Turnpike barrier toll that must be 7-8 miles into Maine and God forbid...well, maybe there was an accident. It was kind of amusing to see cars stopped in the high-speed toll lanes in Hampton; I believe the cool kids would call it a "fail".

I-93 in the Medford ("Meffa") area is under ongoing construction this summer. It's already steered me towards the dreaded Route 1 Sonic-->Kappy's stretch once and could have forced us to go all the way around to Route 2. Admittedly, this is the way I'd always gone before after receiving a dire warning about the local roads between Medford and Arlington being hard to follow. But, it's a new summer and I'm freaking trip-blocking these days, for heaven's sake, so the more direct route was indicated.

Note that the marked stretch of Route 60 has several jogs. More on those later.

All was well - great, even - up to exiting Route 93. Not even a backup or tense moment at the weave lane. The northbound traffic wasn't even that bad - I suspect that some folks have made a habit of avoiding the road this summer to the benefit of schedule-checkers.

Our destination in Arlington was only 3.7 miles from the highway on MA-60, but the road manages to pack in four messy intersections and three rotaries into that space. Now, I've always heard that there are a zillion rotaries in Massachusetts and have certainly come across quite a few, particularly on the Cape and en route to the airport. But this was something else entirely - particularly the back-back rotaries on both sides of the Mystic River.

Also, note that both cross-streets are labeled as the Mystic Valley Parkway. Yeah, that's not confusing at all.

We actually made it through those without incident since our rote was fairly straightforward. It was back in Medford at Winthrop Square where we got off-track.

Odd angles and a random extra street...bad news. Not surprisingly, we ended up on 38 but found our way back to 60 on side streets with the help of Delorme's wide definition of what belongs in a Boston city zoom-in map.

After arrival, we had a wonderful night at Meredith's house with her and Chris. We were all friends together throughout college, but I've talked to each one about the other quite a bit over the years, so to see them both together was especially nice. Not to mention that they are both great, great people who I wish I saw far more often. We (those two plus Alicia, mostly) made a delicious dinner spread, drank delicious gin + lemonades, and enjoyed a very very awesome half-hour on Spy Pond in borrowed canoes.

We drove Chris home to Allston on a route that was as much if not more dizzying than the route to Arlington, but I was taking directions rather than really driving and one dissection of rotary minutia per post is enough. I did take pleasure from Chris enjoying a couple of selections from the mix CD I've been overplaying recently.

Later, as I conveniently took the opportunity let the CD continue playing, Alicia (who's had to hear it a few times, now) declared that it did have a theme, and that the theme was "overwrought male voices". I countered by saying the voices were "just wrought enough".

Overwrought or just wrought enough? You make the call. By the way, the real theme is "rock songs I've always loved but have never heard very often...plus a few extra songs to fill out the CD."

It was a beautiful night for Storrow Drive, and although northbound traffic on US-1 was pretty heavy for almost-midnight, it wasn't anything serious. What a great Friday!